As I was reading through Artful Dodge 44/45, I found a couple of prose-poems by Nin Andrews. I remembered the first of the set, “Calling the Snakes,” because I had read it sometime before, without actually remembering who had written it and where it was from. But it stuck with me, and I get the feeling that now that I’ve read the others, they too will stick around, bumping up against the walls of my brain. You see, although they are short, they elevate everyday experience to the mythic. Straightforward experiences become suddenly complex and some characters inexplicably arrive to their destinations with the aid of some unknown force or intuition. I find this especially true in “Calling the Snakes” where Jimmy becomes the master of the snakes by not only calling them, but asserting his dominance over them as a human. Jimmy is thus an angry god and the snakes are reduced to nothing more than a ritual sacrifice meant only for the sake of appeasing the tyrannical deity’s boredom.

It’s these kind of surprises that create tension between the reader and the text, and, further creates the need to continue reading.

On that note… Have a lovely weekend,

autumn, Editorial Asst.

You can get a dollar off if you order a copy of the Dodge from now until September 1st, when our online submissions platform goes live (we should also have online ordering of issues optimized through Submittable as well). This offer stands for any back issue and our current issue, #52/53 (making back issues $4 and our current issue $11). Just make sure to send in your cash or check with either a note saying “autumn sent me” or a letter in response to one of the hits.